Summary and Analysis
Chapters 33–42: The Ship’s Sinking

Summary

Pi, his family, and most of the animals from the zoo board the Tsimtsum, a ship heading to Canada. The family has arranged the sale of most of the animals to zoos in North America, and they intend to start a new life in Canada. One night, in the middle of the ocean, a massive storm threatens the ship. Pi goes on deck to see what is happening. Fearful of the storm, Pi approaches a group of crew members, expecting assistance in saving his family or at the least advice on what he should do next.

Pi is incredibly surprised when crew members throw him
overboard, with a lifejacket, into a lifeboat. Pi sees animals drowning all
around him and instinctively begins to rescue Richard Parker, though he does realize
what a suicidal move this truly is. Pi watches the ship sink, sure that he will
never know what caused the disaster. However, he does come to realize that the
crew members did not throw him overboard to save him; rather, they were trying
to protect themselves, hoping Pi would distract the wild animals in the water if
the crew themselves needed to abandon ship. Essentially, Pi was used as fodder.

Analysis

These chapters concerning the sinking of the Tsimtsum and Pi’s fate heighten the
tension in the novel, even though we as readers know from the early chapters
that Pi will survive his ordeal. Whether or not Pi survives is not at question;
what captures readers’ attention is how
Pi will survive to tell his story to The Author. Similarly, the chapter describing
the sinking of the Tsimtsum begins by
announcing that it sank. With this revelation out of the way, Martel can slow
down his telling of the story and describe the events leading up to the ship’s
sinking in great detail, with an emphasis on stylistic language rather than on
the events themselves.

These chapters finally reveal who—or what—Richard Parker is.
The Author has already mentioned him in a few of his narrative interruptions,
like when he relates looking at Pi’s few photographs from his life before the
shipwreck. However, the name sounds like a human’s, not an animal’s. When Pi
spots Richard Parker in the water, Pi calls out to him, begging him to answer
that what is happening is nothing but a dream. His calls undercut Pi’s earlier insistence
that he does not, and would not, anthropomorphize—that is, give human traits
and characteristics to something that is not human. Recall that earlier in the
novel Pi’s father warned Pi and his brother never to think of an animal as
having human characteristics, which is exactly what Pi is now doing with
Richard Parker. The tiger has a human’s name, Pi speaks to the tiger as if it were
human, and Pi expects the tiger to reply to him as a human might. Note also
that this scene foreshadows one later in the novel in which Pi, blind and on
the verge of madness, has a complete conversation with Richard Parker about food.

Pi also assigns human feelings and actions to objects, such
as the Tsimtsum (which does “not
care”), the water (which is in a “rage”), and the lifeboat (which has a face
and a prow with a “snub nose”). Pi even constructs a dialogue between his own fear
and reason, with the two arguing over what Pi should do. Telling his story in
the first-person point of view allows Pi to create his own version—his own
reality—of what happened. Even though Martel uses The Author to address the novel’s
readers and assure us that Pi’s version of what happened to him is not
necessarily the truth, Pi as a first-person narrator is free to assign human
sensations and intentions to all sorts of objects, including the ship, the
water, the lifeboat, and even the tiger named Richard Parker. With a narrator as
unreliable as Pi and a story that can be read as both a literary narrative and
a parable or fantasy, the animals that share the lifeboat with Pi can be viewed
as characters (for example, Richard Parker) yet at the same time completely remain
as their animal selves (such as a tiger).